The idea is that if I take care of myself, I will then have the capacity to take better care of my family. That’s the idea and I’ve tried to accept it. But it hasn’t ever really stuck. I’m in the habit of running myself ragged, because there’s always more to do than I can possibly get done. I keep it up until I can’t any more, and then I crash and burn. I vow to change, pick myself up, dust off the ashes, and start all over again.

This doesn’t really work.

By failing to take care of myself, I end up failing to take care of my family. I end up with a longer, more unwieldy To Do list and less capacity to do it with. I get further and further behind. I become more and more vulnerable to depression. The overall effect is disastrous levels of suckage. Simply put, it stinks. But I am stuck.

The key for me is to think about capacity.

If I don’t safeguard my capacity, then I won’t be able to take care of my family in the present. If I don’t build my capacity, then I won’t be able to do the things I want to do in the future. In order to safeguard and build my capacity, I have to take care of myself. My health must come first, next my family, then my (paying) work, and finally my dreams. Throw in a dash of fun and a dollop of sleep and I should have a winning recipe, not that I cook or even want to learn how. The point is that sometimes putting things in order requires less busy hands and more purposeful patience.

So, here’s to taking care of mama: a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, but a mindful look to my own reality is what makes me swallow.

One trait that seems common to autistic individuals is a need for order, for predictability, for sense to be made in this chaotic and unpredictable world—it’s often marked as a deficit. But I’m not sure this is so different from typically developing people. I’ve known more than a few control-freaks who have no other marked traits associated with autism. The difference is how they cope with their need for order and predictability. They apply a patina of control over the world by being rigid and driven, filling their lives with minutiae, and bullying others to conform to their ways of doing things. Their will is a formidable force to be sure, but I can’t really see that sort of behavior as a positive. They don’t look particularly odd, but they attain their semblance of control at the cost of others. Whereas, meltdowns aside, most of the autistic coping mechanisms are less destructive to others’, but limit the abilities of the autists.

For me, order isn’t necessarily a matter of constructing a daily routine. I’ve never found a good way to bring order to my day in the sense that I know what I’ll be doing and when. If nothing else, the irregularity of my sleep cycle interferes with that in problematic fashion—something to work on, definitely. I prefer order to start on a more macro level. I need to have goals for my life, and I set those goals at least five years out. Then I need to break those goals down to what I want to achieve in a given year, a given month, a given week.

The problems I encounter are two-fold. First, I set the wrong goals. Second, life intrudes on my sense of order. In the last two years life has intruded a great deal. Very few of my plans have worked out. Many of those goals were just the wrong goals or the right goals at the wrong times. My goals also lacked a necessary balance—I lacked goals that would improve or maintain my own health and well-being, like getting sufficient sleep on a predictable basis. The rest of it was the natural chaos that results from this messiness we call life. And, of course, I wanted to more than I was able to in the time provided.

Recently, this has all come to something of a head. My train, rumbling ahead at high-speeds, derailed. The aftermath was devastating. It wasn’t just a single point coming on done; it was the accumulation of my chaotic life paired with major and minor goals coming unraveled, seemingly one on top of the other before I could cope with the first. The cars piled up. The result was an inner life more mangled than manageable and an outer life that hasn’t been working for far longer than I’ve been willing to acknowledge.

Sifting through the wreckage has taken some time. Making sense out of the pieces, identifying where I went wrong, and discovering ways to fix it have also taken time. The process isn’t complete, either. But I’m laying new track—setting a new course—and picking out new cars to put on the train that is my life.

Order doesn’t come naturally in this chaotic world. We have to make it where we can, how we can, though often it’s merely illusion. Sometimes I forget that last part.